


Team-Up

by VigilantSycamore



Series: BatCat Week 2018 [5]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: BatCat Week 2018, F/M, Pre-Relationship, Team-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 12:42:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16576712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VigilantSycamore/pseuds/VigilantSycamore
Summary: Batman and Catwoman have officially teamed up against a common enemy - now all they need is a plan. The Penguin should be worried.





	Team-Up

It wasn’t the first time Bruce and Selina worked together on a mission, but it was their first mission as partners. Their goal was to break into the office of Meredith Kenny, one of Oswald Cobblepot’s business partners, and steal her copy of a document listing the fronts Cobblepot used to launder money. They’d pass the copy along to the GCPD, who would hopefully be able to use it to obtain a warrant to investigate Cobblepot and find the original list. Even if that didn’t work, the Outsiders could still use the list to hit Cobblepot where it hurts: his wallet.

Right now, Bruce and Selina were in the Batcave, coming up with a plan for how to actually get the list.

“I went undercover as Elva Barr and made an appointment with Meredith,” Selina explained to Bruce. “That let me get inside her office and figure out where she kept her papers. She has a set of drawers with a four-number combination lock on them – one lock for all three drawers. Each number in the combination can be anywhere from zero to ninety-nine.”

“That’s one hundred million possible combinations,” Bruce said.

“You’d think so, but no,” Selina replied. “See, the lock is actually a modified version of the locks that they used at Los Alamos.”

“I’m… not sure what that means,” Bruce admitted.

Selina rolled her eyes. “Aren’t you the one who memorizes all sorts of trivia? Nevermind,” she shrugged. “Basically, Richard Feynman may be famous for being a physicist, but he was also an amateur safecracker. During the Manhattan Project, he’d make a point of cracking locks – he said it was to demonstrate the security risk, but personally I think he just found it funny.”

Bruce remembered something. “Didn’t you once break into Wayne Tower to ‘demonstrate the security risk’?” he asked her. “In fact, I’m pretty sure those were your exact words.”

Selina smirked at him. “Anyway,” she continued, “one trick he used was that when the lock is open, turning the combination wheel makes the pin go up and down, but if you turn the wheel far enough the pin won’t go back down anymore. Turns out, that happens after the last number of the combination. And once you know the last number, you can repeat it for the second-to-last number. People have a _very_ useful habit – useful to safecrackers, anyway – of leaving things unlocked while they’re in the room.”

“And Kenny did the same thing while ‘Elva’ was in her office?” Bruce guessed.

Selina nodded. “The actual drawers were shut, and even if they weren’t I’d still have had to search them to find the list, but while we were talking, I fiddled with the lock under the table. I was able to figure out the last two numbers in the combination, so now we just need the first two.”

“That’s still ten thousand possible combinations,” Bruce pointed out.

“Technically, yes,” Selina replied. “But there’s a trick for that too. The locks at Los Alamos didn’t need the exact combination to work – any number in the combination could go up or down by two and it would still open the lock. I wanted to see what the range was on this new lock, so I did some shopping and bought a safe, a padlock, and a briefcase that all used the same make of lock. Or close enough, anyway.”

“And?”

“I took them apart, and messed around with them to see what the range was. It’s actually the same as it was back at Los Alamo, which means we only really have to go up in intervals of five to find the first two numbers. So instead of ten thousand possibilities, we have four hundred.”

“Great,” Bruce said. “So once we’re in there, we just have to crack the lock, search the drawers, and find the document, then get out of there.”

“I’ll crack the safe, and you’ll make sure the coast is clear outside the office,” Selina said. “That just leaves _getting_ inside in the first place.”

“I thought there was no security system on the planet that you couldn’t beat,” Bruce teased.

“There isn’t. But in this case I’m not sure _how_ to beat it yet.” Selina brought up an image on the Bat-Computer screen. “This is a picture I took while I was casing the building. Notice how the light bends under the window in the top right corner of the screen?”

Bruce noticed it: a beam of light that came in through the high window bent sharply upwards, then bent down again. A little to the right, the same happened with another beam. It took him one look to figure out what it was.

“That’s an electric field line nanotube lattice,” he said. “Better known as a force field.”

“My guess is its Luthor’s work,” Selina said. “There has to be a way to beat it, right? Maybe an EMP?”

Bruce shook his head. “That _would_ work as long as the field isn’t magnetically shielded, but it would also knock out any other unshielded electronics in the area. That might attract too much attention. But there _is_ a way to get through.”

“And that is?”

“I have contacts at STAR Labs. They’ve been able to demonstrate that one of the properties of kryptonite is that it disrupts the natural force field around Kryptonians – that’s part of why it can hurt Clark – and they’ve been working on replicating that property without the radiation. They’ve managed to generate a beam that forms ‘bubbles’ in the lattice that a solid object, like a person, can pass through.”

“I like the way you think, Bats,” Selina said. “Isn’t Clark worried about STAR Labs studying kryptonite, though?”

“He was the one who gave them the samples,” Bruce said. “And later he told me he thought it was important that _someone_ studies it, and that STAR Labs are the best fit for the job.”

Selina accepted that. “Alright, so we’ve got a plan. And if we get caught, we’ll just kick the guards’ asses.”

“Exactly,” Bruce said, smiling. “I’ll drop by STAR Labs to borrow the tech we’ll need, and this time tomorrow we’ll start the mission.”

Bruce tried to shake hands with Selina and Selina tried to bump fists with Bruce, so the result was an awkward confusion over which gesture they were doing.

“Oh, we’re doing the handshake thing?” Selina asked. “Sorry, I’m just more used to fist bumps. Can we try again?”

“I guess, but... now that I think about it fists bumps are cooler anyway,” Bruce said.

From another part of the cave, Barbara yelled “I knew it!” at Bruce.

“So we should probably go for that one?” Bruce finished.

Bruce and Selina went back and forth like that for a minute or two before agreeing to compromise with a high five.

**Author's Note:**

> I read a biography of Richard Feynman recently and it mentioned that aside from being a physicist he was also an amateur safecracker, so that's where that idea came from.


End file.
